Dismal condition of Africa--Hopes of Wilberforce
disappointed--Organization of the American
Colonization Society--Its necessity, objects, and
policy--Public sentiment in its favor--Opposition
developes itself--Wm. Lloyd Garrison, James G.
Birney, Gerrit Smith--Effects of
opposition--Stimulants to Slavery--Exports of
Cotton--England sustaining American
Slavery--Failure of the Niger Expedition--Strength
of Slavery--Political action--Its failure--Its
fruits.
ANOTHER question, "How shall the slave trade be suppressed?" began to be
agitated near the close of the last century. The moral desolation
existing in Africa, was without a parallel among the nations of the
earth. When the last of our Northern States had freed its slaves, not a
single Christian Church had been successfully established in Africa, and
the slave trade was still legalized to the citizens of every Christian
nation. Even its subsequent prohibition, by the United States and
England, had no tendency to check the traffic, nor ameliorate the
condition of the African. The other Europeon powers, having now the
monopoly of the trade, continued to prosecute it with a vigor it never
felt before. The institution of slavery, while lessened in the United
States, where it had not yet been made profitable, was rapidly acquiring
an unprecedented enlargement in Cuba and Brazil, where its profitable
character had been more fully realized. How shall the slave trade be
annihilated, slavery extension prevented, and Africa receive a Christian
civilization? were questions that agitated the bosom of many a
philanthropist, long after Wilberforce had achieved his triumphs. It was
found, that the passage of laws prohibiting the slave trade, and the
extermination of that traffic, were two distinct things--the one not
necessarily following the other. The success of Wilberforce with the
British Parliament, only increased the necessity for additional
philanthropic efforts; and a quarter of a century afterwards found the
evil vastly increased which he imagined was wholly destroyed.
It was at the period in the history of Africa, and of public sentiment
on slavery, which we have been considering, that the American
Colonization Society was organized. It began its labors when the eye of
the statesman, the philanthropist, and the Christian, could discover no
other plan of overcoming the moral desolation, the universal oppression
of the colored race, than by restoring the most enlightened of their
number to Africa itself. Emancipation, by States, had been at an end for
a dozen of years. The improvement of the free colored people, in the
presence of the slave, was considered impracticable. Slave labor had
become so profitable, as to leave little ground to expect general
emancipation, even though all other objections had been removed. The
slave trade had increased twenty-five per cent. during the preceding ten
years. Slavery was rapidly extending itself in the tropics, and could
not be arrested but by the suppression of the slave trade. The foothold
of the Christian missionary was yet so precarious in Africa, as to leave
it doubtful whether he could sustain his position.
The colonization of the free colored people in Africa, under the
teachings of the Christian men who were prepared to accompany them, it
was believed, would as fully meet all the conditions of the race, as was
possible in the then existing state of the world. It would separate
those who should emigrate from all further contact with slavery, and
from its depressing influences; it would relax the laws of the slave
States against emancipation, and lead to the more frequent liberation of
slaves; it would stimulate and encourage the colored people remaining
here, to engage in efforts for their own elevation; it would establish
free republics along the coast of Africa, and drive away the slave
trader; it would prevent the extension of slavery, by means of the slave
trade, in tropical America; it would introduce civilization and
Christianity among the people of Africa, and overturn their barbarism
and bloody superstitions; and, if successful, it would react upon
slavery at home, by pointing out to the States and General Government, a
mode by which they might free themselves from the whole African race.
The Society had thus undertaken as great an amount of work as it could
perform. The field was broad enough, truly, for an association that
hoped to obtain an income of but five to ten thousand dollars a year,
and realized annually an average of only $3,276 during the first six
years of its existence. It did not include the destruction of American
slavery among the objects it labored to accomplish. That subject had
been fully discussed; the ablest men in the nation had labored for its
overthrow; more than half the original States of the Union had
emancipated their slaves; the advantages of freedom to the colored man
had been tested; the results had not been as favorable as anticipated;
the public sentiment of the country was adverse to an increase of the
free colored population; the few of their number who had risen to
respectability and affluence, were too widely separated to act in
concert in promoting measures for the general good; and, until better
results should follow the liberation of slaves, further emancipations,
by the States, were not to be expected. The friends of the Colonization
Society, therefore, while affording every encouragement to emancipation
by individuals, refused to agitate the question of the general abolition
of slavery. Nor did they thrust aside any other scheme of benevolence in
behalf of the African race. Forty years had elapsed from the
commencement of emancipation in the country, and thirty from the date of
Franklin's Appeal, before the society sent off its first emigrants. At
that date, no extended plans were in existence, promising relief to the
free colored man. A period of lethargy, among the benevolent, had
succeeded the State emancipations, as a consequence of the indifference
of the free colored people, as a class, to their degraded condition. The
public sentiment of the country was fully prepared, therefore, to adopt
colonization as the best means, or, rather, as the only means for
accomplishing any thing for them or for the African race. Indeed, so
general was the sentiment in favor of colonization, somewhere beyond the
limits of the United States, that those who disliked Africa, commenced a
scheme of emigration to Hayti, and prosecuted it, until eight thousand
free colored persons were removed to that island--a number nearly
equaling the whole emigration to Liberia up to 1850. Haytien emigration,
however, proved a most disastrous experiment.
But the general acquiescence in the objects of the Colonization Society
did not long continue. The exports of cotton from the South were then
rapidly on the increase. Slave labor had become profitable, and slaves,
in the cotton-growing States, were no longer considered a burden. Seven
years after the first emigrants reached Liberia, the South exported
294,310,115 lbs. of cotton; and, the year following, the total cotton
crop reached 325,000,000 lbs. But a great depression in prices had
occurred,[7] and alarmed the planters for their safety. They had
decided against emancipation, and now to have their slaves rendered
valueless, was an evil they were determined to avert. The Report of the
Boston Prison Discipline Society, which appeared at this moment, was
well calculated, by the disclosures it made, to increase the alarm in
the South, and to confirm slaveholders in their belief of the dangers of
emancipation.
At this juncture, a warfare against colonization was commenced at the
South, and it was pronounced an abolition scheme in disguise. In
defending itself, the society re-asserted its principles of neutrality
in relation to slavery, and that it had only in view the colonization of
the free colored people. In the heat of the contest, the South were
reminded of their former sentiments in relation to the whole colored
population, and that colonization merely proposed removing one division
of a people they had pronounced a public burden.[8]
The emancipationists at the North had only lent their aid to
colonization in the hope that it would prove an able auxiliary to
abolition; but when the society declared its unalterable purpose to
adhere to its original position of neutrality, they withdrew their
support, and commenced hostilities against it. "The Anti-Slavery
Society," said a distinguished abolitionist, "began with a declaration
of war against the Colonization Society."[9] This feeling of hostility
was greatly increased by the action of the abolitionists of England.
The doctrine of "Immediate, not Gradual Abolition," was announced by
them as their creed; and the anti-slavery men of the United States
adopted it as the basis of their action. Its success in the English
Parliament, in procuring the passage of the Act for West India
emancipation, in 1833, gave a great impulse to the abolition cause in
the United States.
In 1832, William Lloyd Garrison declared hostilities against the
Colonization Society; in 1834, James G. Birney followed his example;
and, in 1836 Gerritt Smith also abandoned the cause. The North
everywhere resounded with the cry of "Immediate Abolition;" and, in
1837, the abolitionists numbered 1,015 societies; had seventy agents
under commission, and an income, for the year, of $36,000.[10] The
Colonization Society, on the other hand, was greatly embarrassed. Its
income, in 1838, was reduced to $10,000; it was deeply in debt; the
parent society did not send a single emigrant, that year, to Liberia;
and its enemies pronounced it bankrupt and dead.[11]
But did the abolitionists succeed in forcing emancipation upon the
South, when they had thus rendered colonization powerless? Did the
fetters fall from the slave at their bidding? Did fire from heaven
descend, and consume the slaveholder at their invocation? No such thing!
They had not touched the true cause of the extension of slavery. They
had not discovered the secret of its power; and, therefore, its locks
remained unshorn, its strength unabated. The institution advanced as
triumphantly as if no opposition existed. The planters were progressing
steadily, in securing to themselves the monopoly of the cotton markets
of Europe, and in extending the area of slavery at home. In the same
year that Gerritt Smith declared for abolition, the title of the Indians
to fifty-five millions of acres of land, in the slave States, was
extinguished, and the tribes removed. The year that colonization was
depressed to the lowest point, the exports of cotton, from the United
States, amounted to 595,952,297 lbs., and the consumption of the article
in England, to 477,206,108 lbs.
When Mr. Birney seceded from colonization, he encouraged his new allies
with the hope, that West India free labor would render our slave labor
less profitable, and emancipation, as a consequence, be more easily
effected. How stood this matter six years afterward? This will be best
understood by contrast. In 1800, the West Indies exported 17,000,000
lbs. of cotton, and the United States, 17,789,803 lbs. They were then
about equally productive in that article. In 1840, the West India
exports had dwindled down to 427,529 lbs., while those of the United
States had increased to 743,941,061 lbs.
And what was England doing all this while? Having lost her supplies from
the West Indies, she was quietly spinning away at American slave labor
cotton; and to ease the public conscience of the kingdom, was loudly
talking of a free labor supply of the commodity from the banks of the
Niger! But the expedition up that river failed, and 1845 found her
manufacturing 626,496,000 lbs. of cotton, mostly the product of American
slaves! The strength of American slavery at that moment may be inferred
from the fact, that we exported that year 872,905,996 lbs. of cotton,
and our production of cane sugar had reached over 200,000,000 lbs.;
while, to make room for slavery extension, we were busied in the
annexation of Texas and in preparations for the consequent war with
Mexico!
But abolitionists themselves, some time before this, had, mostly, become
convinced of the feeble character of their efforts against slavery, and
allowed politicians to enlist them in a political crusade, as the last
hope of arresting the progress of the system. The cry of "Immediate
Abolition" died away; reliance upon moral means was mainly abandoned;
and the limitation of the institution, geographically, became the chief
object of effort. The results of more than a dozen years of political
action are before the public, and what has it accomplished! We are not
now concerned in the inquiry of how far the strategy of politicians
succeeded in making the votes of abolitionists subservient to slavery
extension. That they did so, in at least one prominent case, will never
be denied by any candid man. All we intend to say, is, that the cotton
planters, instead of being crippled in their operations, were able, in
the year ending the last of June, 1853, to export 1,111,570,370 lbs. of
cotton, beside supplying near 300,000,000 lbs. for home consumption; and
that England, the year ending the last of January, 1853, consumed the
unprecedented quantity of 817,998,048 lbs. of that staple.[12] The year
1854, instead of finding slavery perishing under the blows it had
received, has witnessed the destruction of all the old barriers to its
extension, and beholds it expanded widely enough for the profitable
employment of the slave population, with all its natural increase, for a
hundred years to come!!
If political action against slavery has been thus disastrously
unfortunate, how is it with anti-slavery action, at large, as to its
efficiency at this moment? On this point, hear the testimony of a
correspondent of Frederick Douglass' Paper, January 26, 1855:
"How gloriously did the anti-slavery cause arise . . . . . . in 1833-4!
And now what is it, in our agency! . . . . . . What is it, through the
errors or crimes of its advocates variously--probably quite as much as
through the brazen, gross, and licentious wickedness of its enemies.
Alas! what is it but a mutilated, feeble, discordant, and half-expiring
instrument, at which Satan and his children, legally and illegally,
scoff! Of it I despair."
Such are the crowning results of both political and anti-slavery action,
for the overthrow of slavery! Such are the demonstrations of their utter
impotency as a means of relief to the bond and free of the colored
people!
Surely, then, if the negro is capable of elevation, it is time that some
other measures should be devised, than those hitherto adopted, for the
melioration of the African race! Surely, too, it is time for the
American people to rebuke that class of politicians, North and South,
whose only capital consists in keeping up a fruitless warfare upon the
subject of slavery--nay! abundant in fruits to the poor colored man; but
to him, "their vine is of the vine of Sodom, and of the fields of
Gomorrah; their grapes are grapes of gall, their clusters are bitter;
their vine is the poison of dragons, and the cruel venom of asps."[13]
The application of this language, to the case under consideration, will
be fully justified when the facts, in the remaining pages of this work,
are carefully studied.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] See Table I, Appendix.
[8] The sentiment of the Colonization Society, was expressed in the
following resolution, embraced in its annual report of 1826:
"_Resolved_,--That the society disclaims, in the most unqualified terms,
the design attributed to it, of interfering, on the one hand, with the
legal rights and obligations of slavery; and, on the other, of
perpetuating its existence within the limits of the country."
On another occasion Mr. Clay, on behalf of the society, defined its
position thus:
"It protested, from the commencement, and throughout all its progress,
and it now protests, that it entertains no purpose, on its own
authority, or by its own means, to attempt emancipation, partial or
general; that it knows the General Government has no constitutional
power to achieve such an object; that it believes that the States, and
the States only, which tolerate slavery, can accomplish the work of
emancipation; and that it ought to be left to them exclusively,
absolutely, and voluntarily, to decide the question."--_Tenth Annual
Report, p. 14, 1828._
[9] Gerrit Smith, 1835.
[10] Lundy's Life.
[11] On the floor of an Ecclesiastical Assembly, one minister pronounced
colonization "a dead horse;" while another claimed that his "old mare
was giving freedom to more slaves, by trotting off with them to Canada,
than the Colonization Society was sending of emigrants to Liberia."
[12] This portion of the work is left unchanged, and the statistics of
the increase of slave labor products, up to 1859, introduced elsewhere.
[13] Deuteronomy, xxxii. 32, 33.